Behind Victoria’s Series of Mystery Church Fires

By Patrick Carlyon
Herald Sun
November 28, 2015

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ANDREW Collins had handled many odd requests when a man came to the door one night and asked for petrol.

Mr Collins, a prominent victim of paedophile priests, recognised a visitor in distress, a fellow traveller in a haze of hurt and anger.

He asked the man in for a coffee. They talked about the St Alipius boys’ school at Ballarat. There, monsters had long masqueraded as men of faith, preying on boys uninterrupted.

The boy, like so many of his peers, had grown up to be broken. He always recoiled from that building in Victoria St.

He wondered how the red bricks and the slate roofs of the old school had remained as a monument to cruelty. He wanted it erased. That’s what the petrol was for, to burn it to the ground.

Mr Collins talked his guest out of his plan.